Twenty-five-year-old Nazma Begum from Kurigram became unemployed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, she heard about the ‘Kollyani Nari Kollyan Initiative’, a UNDP-supported women- led cooperative that sells low-cost sanitary napkins to people in the local community and joined the cooperative. Nazma, along with her other team members now produce 2,500 sanitary pads every day and sells them to local pharmacies and shops. She earns around Tk. 6,000 every month (USD 70),which helps her in managing her family expenses.
The idea for establishing such cooperatives to sustain the economic empowerment of women came from UNDP Bangladesh’s SWAPNO (Strengthening Women’s Ability for Productive New Opportunities) project. SWAPNO is a joint initiative of Bangladesh’s Local Government Division and UNDP Bangladesh supported by the Embassy of Sweden. It is a gender-based social security project targeting economically disadvantaged rural women living on the fringes of society. The objective of SWAPNO is to ensure that economic opportunities reach rural women so that economic growth is achieved in a more inclusive manner.
The cooperative where Nazma works started in March 2020 and initially produced masks. However, after consultation with the community, they identified a significant demand and need for sanitary napkins, which the economically disadvantaged women and girls in Kurigram could not afford. Therefore, the general secretary of the cooperative, Khadija Parvin Khushi, decided to switch to low-cost sanitary napkin production in March 2021, which the project supported by providing training to the cooperative members. Not only did the initiative help in empowering women like Khushi, Nazma and others in the cooperative (around 30 in total), but also empowered women and girls in their communities by ensuring their access to menstrual hygiene products. A very recent evaluation conducted by BIDS (Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies) also found that the increased income of the cooperative members led to their increased access to decision-making, greater mobility and agentic practice.
Stories like those of Nazma and Khushi further underscore the need to support livelihood and economic empowerment programs and projects like SWAPNO, especially within the new COVID context’s adverse impacts on women in Bangladesh. Of the total female workforce, more than 90% are in the informal sector, while also making up around 80% of the country’s ready-made garments workforce, which has been hit hard by the pandemic. Various studies, including by WHO and the OECD, show that women are more affected by the increased burden of unpaid care work and restricted mobility, and are therefore more likely to bear the brunt of any economic fallouts.
Thus, UNDP Bangladesh’s interventions are not only timely but also respond to the need of the hour, significantly addressing the issue of empowerment of women and contributing towards transformative change including cross-cutting areas such as reducing the digital divide, climate resilience, and decision-making and political participation. UNDP Bangladesh’s efforts in the area of women’s economic empowerment are designed to reduce bottlenecks and ensure their access to human, financial, and social capital, as well as increase their agency. UNDP Bangladesh will continue supporting women’s empowerment through advocating for increased employment opportunities, elevated investment in social transformation for gender equality, and promoting the participation of women in decision-making to achieve truly transformational change, thereby also ensuring the UN goal of ‘leaving no one behind’ is achieved, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is well and truly met.
